Your prospects have a need for a product or service offered by your company. But, to them, you’re just like any other company peddling your goods for their money. While your first instinct is to go for the hard sell by pushing facts and figures, research shows that many people make decisions based on emotion. In fact, buying decisions are based on20% logic and 80% emotion. I guess that explains why I’ve adopted so many animals...

Without being too pushy or insincere, you need to make an emotional connection with prospects as part of the sales process. That’s called - big surprise - emotional intelligence marketing. Here are some tips on how to tap into your prospect’s emotions to convert them into customers.

Understand Your Clients

To appeal to the right emotions, you need to get to know your buyer personas and understand how to make your company relevant to that audience. Abuyer persona outlines a prospect’s behavior patterns, passions, challenges, objectives as well as demographic profiles to understand better what motivates and keeps them up at night. While not actual people, buyer personas are based on real data and what you already know about prospective customers.

Using this acquired information, you can more closely align your products and services to their emotions. While you may think you know your target audience, you need to take greater steps to actually find out what makes them tick. Take the time to create buyer personas to delve into your prospect’s emotional profiles. Find out how your products and services can address their needs to stimulate a positive response or emotion from them.

Use Visuals

In this day and age, where smartphones and tablets are rampant, emojis have emerged as an almost universal language. When “OMG” cannot clearly communicate your emotional turmoil, an emoji can do the trick. When you receive a smiley, winky, or (my personal fave) heart-shaped emoji, you instantly know what the sender meant and react without even reading a word.

The same is true with your marketing efforts. Images used to support facts or promote a brand can draw an instant connection with a person even before they read any copy. As visuals are easier to decode than text, they capture consumers’ attentions quickly. In fact, readers process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. While images are processed by long-term memory, words are handled by our short-term memory and, therefore, retained for shorter amounts of time, according to Dr. Lynell Burmark, Ph.D. Associate at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development. You will remember seeing this image of an arrow ➨ long after reading the words “this is an arrow.”

Appealing to cognitive and emotional reasoning, images can create long-lasting appeal to a prospect. When you see the golden arches in the distance, you immediately think McDonald’s and may feel a deluge of emotions attached to your perceptions of the brand. Images are powerful. Use them in marketing communications - website, collateral literature, emails or newsletters - to conjure instant emotions and tie together a brand image across different vehicles to reinforce your message and appeal.

Create Value Propositions

Of course, you are proud of your product’s bells and whistles. But, prospects want to know the potential value of product features to them personally. Rather than push information about your products in hopes that prospects match them to their specific needs, speak to their pain and frustrations (as identified in their personas) and outline benefits that address those challenges.

Empathy demonstrates that you understand your prospect’s emotional state of mind and can meet their needs. Building this emotional connection prompts them in taking the next step in understanding you and your products, which is essential in making the sale.

Just like the emotional connections you make with friends, forming a bond with your prospects can turn them into long-term customers. Implementing an emotional intelligence marketing strategy could mean the difference between executing a successful campaign or your marketing getting lost in the white noise of your competitors.

Courtney Feairheller

Courtney is the content writer at Stratus Interactive, where she is responsible for writing original, thought-provoking blog posts on a variety of topics. Courtney has been writing stories since she was a wee little one and has experience in B2B and B2C content marketing in addition to SEO. See all Courtney Feairheller's posts.